


Incidental Damages

by pendrecarc



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Comment Fic, Episode: s02e13 Dead Reckoning, Episode: s02e15 Booked Solid, Episode: s02e16 Relevance, Episode: s02e20 In Extremis, Episode: s02e21 Zero Day, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-06
Updated: 2013-07-06
Packaged: 2017-12-17 22:27:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/872665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A name; a problem; a target; a shovel; an appointment.</p>
<p>Five episodes, five drabbles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Incidental Damages

**Author's Note:**

> Comment fic for [linman](http://archiveofourown.org/users/linman/pseuds/linman), who asked for a drabble or short character study.

She has a name. She holds it in her hand, holds it not to her heart but alongside her gun, which is better. She doesn’t glance at her watch, but she does wonder, briefly, what sort of negotiations have passed up on the top floor. Ruthless self-interest meets guilt-ridden self-sacrifice, and the winner is—neither, so long as she’s the third player.

She doesn’t really care. She might have, once; she used to have some patience for fondness. (She used to like dogs, too.) Now she doesn’t even look back.

It’s the last mistake she’ll ever make.

 

***

 

She’s not interested in attachments. She likes her work challenging and her sex uncomplicated. The man flourishing keys to the penthouse looks perfect on paper, but her gut says he’s dragging more baggage than she’d like.

Still, she knows a good deal when it’s on offer.

And it is good. Not the best she’s had, but it’s close. There’s no awkwardness, just professionalism, enthusiasm, and fun until she looks down at him from the crest of her second climax and discovers it’s as much in affection as in lust.

This poses a problem, but then she’s good at fixing those.

 

***

 

She’s used to being the gun in someone else’s hand, but nobody tells a dead woman what to do.

She took no shame in being a soldier; she likes knowing she’s part of the bigger picture, that her role is a gear slotted right beside someone else’s, all moving together. You don’t get to be as good as she is without learning to appreciate specialization. Only now she’s cut loose, a compass spinning past north—oh, fuck it, she hates metaphors.

She needs a mission. “I am so glad you said that,” she remembers, and smiles to herself.

Target acquired.

 

***

 

She’s not sure what brought her here, the lines she’s crossed that make it possible for her to cross this one. She tries to trace them back and loses the thread. Oh, she can identify each law she’s broken—she’s lied to federal agents, aided and abetted vigilantes, destroyed evidence and falsified reports—but every time it was because keeping them would lead to more harm than good. She risked her own son rather than give up the criminals she was sworn to protect. She’s compromised many things getting here, but not yet her integrity.

She picks up the shovel.

 

***

 

When her call goes to voicemail, she waits another ten minutes because it’s polite and then another twenty because she’s hopeful. She’s had work drop in her lap before, work she’s done well, but nothing that’s excited her. She waits because the woman on the other end of the phone had a kind voice and a creative energy that reawakened the thirst for collaboration she thought died out—well, she knows when that died.

Nothing comes of it. What she feels then isn’t quite disappointment; it’s the dying gasp of a hope she forgot she had in the first place.

 

 


End file.
